I recently spoke to the CBC’s Shelagh Rogers on The Next Chapter about my novel Makers. The interview just aired, and they’ve put up streaming audio of it as well.
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Makers
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I’ll be on CBC’s The Next Chapter with Sheelagh Rogers this Monday at 1PM Eastern, discussing my novel Makers (it’ll also be streamable after it airs).
Hey, Germans! Next Monday, I leave for a ten-day tour of Deutschland with the German edition of Little Brother. At my urging, my publisher Rowohlt has set an insane pace so that I get to as many places as possible. I’m coming to Hamburg, Braunschweig, Köln, Seeheim-Jugenheim, Erding and Göttingen.
I wrap up with two days in Amsterdam, where I’m appearing at Picnic and doing an event for the Bits of Freedom activist group, in honor of the launch for the Dutch edition of Makers.
Can’t wait to see you!
HarperVoyager, my UK publisher, have just published British editions of the three novels they didn’t already have in print: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. There’s also a UK paperback edition of Makers out this week.
I’m going to be celebrating all these UK launches at Clerkenwell Tales in London on July 20, in an event with China Mieville, chaired by English PEN’s Robert Sharp. The event’s set for 7PM and space is limited (though attendance is free). Email Clerkenwell Tales to RSVP.
I’m absolutely delighted to announce that my novel Makers has made the shortlist for Canada’s Sunburst Award, a juried prize “presented annually to Canadian writers with a speculative fiction novel or book-length collection of speculative fiction published any time during the previous calendar year.”
I’ve won the Sunburst twice before — once in 2003 for my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and again in 2009 for my novel Little Brother. I’m so pleased to be honored again, and to be listed among such worthy colleagues on the shortlist.
W00t! My novel MAKERS is a finalist for the 2010 John W Campbell Memorial Award. The other nominees include some of my favorite books of the year, such as Bruce Sterling’s CARYATIDS, Bacigalupe’s WINDUP GIRL, Mieville’s CITY AND THE CITY and Wilson’s JULIAN COMSTOCK. I was privileged to win this award for my novel Little Brother in 2009.
Last year, my novel Makers was published and syndicated free as a series of 81 blog-posts on Tor.com. Tor had the insanely creative people at Idiots’ Books produce 81 interlocking, tesselating illustrations, one for each installment, and made a sweet little Flash toy that let you play with making your own meta-illo by moving the tiles around.
Now, Idiots Books have released a limited edition set of physical cards that let you play the tile-game on your living room floor. I handed these out to folks on the For the Win tour, to great reactions. They’re $12, and you can get them now.
Jeff Clark sez, “I’ve created a graphic from the text of ‘Makers’ that shows the distribution of the various proper nouns in your work. It seems to do a pretty good job of communicating the ebb and flow of the various characters throughout the book.”
This works amazingly well — I’ve never seen an automated text analysis that was so revealing of the emotional and plot elements of a book!
Here’s an interview I did about my novel Makers with the NPR program Writers’ Voice. I share the bill with David Bollier, co-founder of Public Knowledge.
Sandy works with the Ice Owls, a team of blind and low-vision hockey players. In the course of making the team’s website, Sandy had need of some sample text with which to test the site with a screen-reader. Instead of opting for the boring, non-representative “lorem ipsum” text, Sandy used text from my novel Makers. What a cool place to find myself — more testament to the awesome power of ubiquitous, pluripotent Creative Commons text!
Update: David Jordan sez, “I just saw your post about Makers as Lorem Ipsum and was reminded about my use of Little Brother in the Google Summer of Code proposal, which is to turn the freedom-loving, debian-based Nokia n900 into an accessibility device that reads printed text. At any rate I made a demo video using Little Brother as an example. I’ll bet this could read a Kindle to a blind person, no matter what Amazon/the publisher says.”
